Death of a Discipline

For almost three decades, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, has been ignoring the standardized ‘rules’ of the academy and trespassing across disciplinary boundaries. Today she remains one of the foremost figures in the study of world literature and its cultural consequences. In this new book she declares the death of comparative literature as we know it and sounds an urgent call for a ‘new comparative literature’, in which the discipline is given new life—one that is not appropriated and determined by the market. In the era of globalization, when mammoth projects of world literature in translation are being undertaken in the United States, how can we protect the multiplicity of languages and literatures at the university? Spivak demonstrates how critics interested in social justice should pay close attention to literary form and offers new interpretations of classics such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Through close readings of texts not only in English, French and German but also in Arabic and Bengali, Spivak practises what she preaches. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Myself I Must Remake; In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics; The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues; Outside in the Teaching Machine and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. She is the translator of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps, Breast Stories, Old Women and Chotti Munda and His Arrow.